What does it mean (and what has it meant) for music to be orderly, well-ordered?

What does it mean (and what has it meant) for music to be disorderly?

Columbia University Music Department welcomes submissions for the annual Columbia Music Scholarship Conference, to be held March 4, 2017. Professor Eric Drott will provide the keynote address. The conference organizers hope to bring together papers in any area of music research that provide productive, inventive, and diverse responses to this year’s theme, Music: Order and Disorder. Papers might address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

How is music ordered? How is musical knowledge ordered in art forms, academic disciplines, and genres? What kinds of ordering strategies have been imposed on music -- cataloging systems, genre labeling, formal analytical techniques, algorithmic and computational analyses?

How has music resisted or yielded to these strategies? How might we understand musical creation and composition in relation to chaos and order? In what ways have musicians represented order and disorder in sound?

How does music order? How does music control or discipline bodies, populations, rituals, practices, nations, and identities? What is music’s organizational role in legal, educational, medical, religious, political, and military settings? Which hierarchies exist in musical “art worlds”?

How does music generate disorder? When and how has disorder been seen to threaten musical coherence? How and when is such a threat generative? What is the role of music in protest and resistance? How have music and its listeners been pathologized? When and how have music and sound been used to diagnose and treat illness or identify and navigate disability?

To submit a proposal, please send an email with your name, institution, email address, and an abstract of no more than 250 words to cmsc2017 [at] gmail.com by December 31, 2016. The committee will select papers anonymously. All scholars who submit abstracts will be notified of the committee’s decision by February 1, 2017.

co-chairs

PhD Student in Music Theory

Eamonn Bell graduated from Trinity College, Dublin with a B.A. (Mod.) Mathematics and Music in June 2013. He joined the Department of Music in Fall 2013. His research interests include computational and mathematical applications in music studies, and the methodology of music analysis.

PhD Student in Historical Musicology

Paula Clare Harper is a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at Columbia University. Her work focuses on issues of circulation, sharing, sociality and social media, fandom, gender, and representation. She has presented on topics ranging from Beyoncé, to Taylor Swift, to internet musical practices, at conferences across the country and internationally.

PhD Student in Historical Musicology

Ralph began his education in the state sector in Scotland and at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, where he studied double bass, piano, and composition. He went on to receive a first-class bachelor's degree and master's degree with distinction from King's College, London. His master's dissertation there, supervised by Prof. Roger Parker, considered Hanns Eisler's film music ideals and practices.

5:15–7:00 p.m.Closing remarks and reception

panel chairs

Lecturer in Music and Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities (2015-18)

Carmel Raz received her PhD in music theory from Yale in 2015. She holds a Diplom in violin from the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, and a Masters in composition from the University of Chicago. Her book project investigates early Romantic auditory cultures at the intersection of music and neuroscience. Additional interests include the interaction between experimental music, the phonograph, and phonetics in the early twentieth century. She has received fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung, as well as the Mellon Graduate Achievement Award.

Assistant Professor of Music, Ethnomusicology

Alessandra Ciucci received her PhD in music (ethnomusicology) from The City University of New York at The Graduate Center. Her research interests include: the music of Morocco, North Africa, the Mediterranean, music and gender, sung poetry, popular music of the Arab world, and music and migration. Her articles appear in Ethnomusicology, The Yearbook for Traditional Music, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Mondi Migranti, Cahiers de musiques traditionnelles, in the Sage Encyclopedia of Ethnomusicology, and in several edited volumes.

Assistant Professor of Music

Mariusz Kozak joined Columbia University in 2013. His research focuses on the emergence of musical meaning in contemporary art music, the development and cognitive bases of musical experience, and the phenomenology of bodily interactions in musical behavior. In his work, he bridges experimental approaches from embodied cognition with phenomenology and music analysis, in particular using motion-capture technology to study the movements of performers and listeners. His articles have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum and Music Theory Online, among others.

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